Director's Cut - 1

It happened at last!! Ever since my Higher Secondary school days I wanted to be a cinema director! Seriously. I am not joking. I don't know from where that dream landed in my brain and heart. But it did. During my earlier school days I wanted to be a Doctor. It is a different, tragic story that the biology classes in our high school days pushed me to opt for the Computer Science group during my higher secondary classes.

September 19-20, 2009. Tanjavur.

I was sitting next to the director of "Kalavani" looking at the monitor! It has been more than a decade since I finished my schooling. It was a great feeling to find myself in the sets of an actual movie shooting. Kind of dream come true.

Beauty in chaos - that is the only line that can truly convey what happens on the sets. You have people running around madly looking for someone/something, assistants desperately trying to get the sets and the props ready, a few men shouting at the top of their voices asking someone to get something to the sets, tea boys shuttling at the location with tea cups/juice bottles, associates trying to explain the situation to the cast/crowd and make them ready for the shoot, huge cables from the generator van coiled around the whole place like hungry pythons, dance masters trying to extract the right moves, the lead artists' vans parked at a distance, a few men permanently hooked on to their cellphones, the curious crowd that sieges the unit, the caterer with his huge tiffin carriers...the list goes on. And at the end of all this repeated over a few months or so - you have a finished movie! That is something truly amazing.

The whole thing hinges on that one person called - Director. Apart from being a highly creative person, a director is also expected to be an extraordinary General Manager. I really don't know how in spite of all the headaches on the sets, one is able to be creative and make others too deliver. Creativity needs relatively calmer mind/environment, as far as I know. For instance let us take the apparently creative task of writing this blog post. Just try writing something or drawing something with a dozen people watching you amidst lots of chatter. It is not going to be an easy task even to write one good paragraph. Just magnify the complexity of the creative task as well the chaos around, say a thousand times, you have a director's job!

The story will continue...